A Common Open Policy Service (COPS) protocol for support of policy provisioning (COPS-PR) is defined in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) document, Request for Comments (RFC) 3084. As described, a policy enforcement point (PEP), such as a router, is required to buffer state information (e.g., request messages (REQs) and delete request state messages (DRQs)) while disconnected from a policy decision point (PDP), such as a policy server, and communicate this state information back to the PDP upon reconnection. However, the COPS-PR protocol fails to specify a mechanism to trigger a differential state synchronization. Rather, the PDP may request a full state synchronization from the PEP and perform reconciliation between the states on the PDP and the PEP. This process may consume a considerable amount of time and cause undesirable service disruption. Additionally, in instances when the PDP crashes and a back-up PDP is available, the back-up PDP may request a full state synchronization from the PEP, which may also consume a considerable amount of time.